To understand Jharkhand’s voting patterns, we first need to reconsider the role of Adivasis in India’s history. Generally speaking, both during and after British rule, India’s tribal peoples suffered a serious reduction in their mobility and autonomy, eroding their once-mighty geopolitical influence. They have also come to be seen as somewhat isolated – geographically, politically, religiously – from the rest of the subcontinent.
This is an inaccurate stereotype. The fact is that “tribal” peoples have repeatedly, and successfully, engaged with agrarian states on their own terms. Over the last 2,000 years, the Palli and Surutiman peoples shaped the fates of the Chola empire in South India; others established the Hoysala kingdom in South Karnataka; some, like the Bhanjas, have risen to be aristocrats in inland Odisha; Gonds served as Sultanate vassals in the inland Deccan. In all these cases, Adivasis displayed an astounding ability to control trade routes, appropriate religious ideas, and absorb new political cultures.
Jharkhand is no exception. In recent decades, India’s far Right has made a sustained attempt to claim that Jharkhand’s peoples are “originally” Hindu, and the BJP’s 2024 assembly campaign leaned heavily into Hindutva tropes, such as fearmongering about Muslim “infiltration”. There are clearly Hindu elements in Jharkhand’s Adivasi religious traditions. Consider, for example, the epic of the Munda people, studied by KS Singh, the former director-general of the Anthropological Survey of India (AnSI) in The Munda Epic: An Interpretation.
The Mundas belong to the Chhotanagpur Plateau, a resource-rich territory that shaped Gangetic history in the Iron Age around 500 BCE. Their epic relates how their Sun spirit, Sing Bonga, assisted by the Virgin Goddess, came down to the Earth to punish the Asur people of the Neterhat plateau. Finding that the Asur’s iron forges were polluting the forest, and seeing that they were cruel to birds, Sing Bonga trapped their boys and men in a kiln and incinerated them. According to Singh, this ‘drubbing’ convinced the Asurs to turn to agriculture, and confirmed the Mundas in their own agrarian practices.
As Singh points out, Sing Bonga is sometimes represented today as the Hindu deity Krishna, and the notion of his descent from the heavens must come from the idea of an avatar. The Virgin Goddess, too, seems to have been inspired by the Hindu goddess Durga. But that’s where the similarities end: The Virgin Goddess lacks the association with warfare and beauty that Durga possesses, and Sing Bonga’s legends have little trace of Vaishnavism in them. Singh traces the appearance of Hindu elements to the 15thcentury, when a tide of Bhaktireligiosity emerged from the neighbouring regions of Bengal and Bihar, and suggests that the Mundas adapted these elements to explain their relationship to the rival Asurs.
Also read: Rama and the King: How an ancient hero was used by Pala poets, Chola emperors
The rise of reformers
This ability to absorb ideas from the wider world, to turn them to local religion and politics, is visible again and again from the 19th century onwards in Jharkhand. The British Raj, seeking to exploit the region’s resources, encouraged the immigration of dikus – often Hindu settlers from Bihar, Bengal and beyond. Historian PK Shukla writes in Adivasi Peasantry’s Struggle for Land Rights and the Quest for Identity that the British tried to understand Adivasis as ‘primitive’, ethnically inferior, non-Aryan ‘noble savages’, as opposed to the civilised ‘Aryan’ upper castes who made up the backbone of the British colonial enterprise. From the British perspective, Adivasi hostility to the colonial state was simply ethnic hostility from the savage against the civilised.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Shukla’s analysis of colonial records shows an oppressive economic system. The Raja of Chhotanagpur, for example, handed out dozens of villages to immigrant courtiers, requiring locals to compulsorily provide free labour. From as early as 1767, Jharkhand’s tribal peoples formed unprecedented alliances with each other to expel these new landlords.
But the British simply won over existing zamindars, and by 1855, colonial police, revenue officials, and courts had set up a brutally extortionate system. Loan interest rates ranged from 50 to 500 per cent, market prices were exploitative, and lands were forcibly appropriated. And so Adivasi uprisings continued, starting with the 1855 Santal Rebellion. There were four others until the most famous such movement — that of Birsa, a young Munda man.
Birsa grew up in the 1870s under the shadow of colonial exploitation. Having received a rudimentary missionary education, Birsa then spent a brief stint under a Vaishnavite preacher, wearing a sacred thread. He went on to spearhead a massive uprising against the British, attacking police stations, bazaars, and churches – all sites of Adivasi exploitation. This has led the Sangh Parivar to portrayBirsa as a protector of “Hindus”, a claim thoroughly investigated by journalist Nolina Minj.
According to her report, songs by Birsa’s followers also suggest he attacked temples. According to Dr KS Singh (Munda Epic), apparently inspired both by Hindu and Christian ideas, Birsa also demanded the end of Bonga spirit worship and halting the consumption of rice beer. He came to be seen as a deity in his own right, opposed to all outsiders: in his follower’s words, ‘Rajas, Hakims, Zamindars, and Christians’. Birsa died in 1899, captured after a disastrous battle with colonial sepoys.
But resistance continued. During World War I, another young man, Jatra Bhagat, claimed to have received a vision from ‘Bhagwan’ and reiterated Birsa’s commandments, mobilising tens of thousands of Kurukh (Oraon) Adivasis in what came to be known as the Tana Bhagat movement. Historian Sanjay Kumar, in The Tana Bhagat Movement in Chotanagpur (1914–1920), points out that the Tana Bhagats prayed to a certain ‘German Baba’, apparently to antagonise the war-paranoid British. They also proclaimed in their pamphlets:
“It is no longer the Raj of zamindars. The earth belongs to ploughmen. Nobody should give any rent or chowkidari tax. The banias (traders) must not attend the bazaars. They rob the men. Marwaris! May your cloth be burned to ashes! Musalmans may you perish! The vagabonds and prostitutes will perish as soon as Phalgun comes. Brahmins, Rajput raja and zamindars had nothing to eat when they come here but now they have become so powerful as to beat the Oraons and Mundas. Christians are the lowest class. God says so.”
There’s a consistent trend here, and it’s not the Hindutva narrative of “Hindu” adivasis driving away Christian missionaries. The fact is that Jharkhand’s people had (and have) a consistent ability to absorb new narratives, seek to reform and change their faiths, and insist on their right to decide what happens with their resources – no matter the coloniser. Their politics privilege their shared lands and Adivasi identity, rather than external religious labels.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti. Views are personal.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)